The Loosest Possible Vibe of Deconstruction
On not deconstructing enough.
One of the difficulties I’m finding in writing a book on deconstruction is that trying to talk about what “deconstruction” is is a bit of a moving target. I still think my definition is accurate. I think it makes the most sense of what it is more than anything else I’ve seen. The problem is that as the word continues to be TikTokified, it increasingly becomes an identity marker for those who associate with the loosest possible vibe of deconstruction.
If the business world has MVPs (minimum viable products), maybe the internet has LPVs (loosest possible vibes).
It’s sort of like “woke” or “Christian nationalist.” Care about social justice and think Christians should be involved in justice for the poor and marginalized? You’ve gone “woke.” Think some level of Christian influence in government is a net good for society? You're a Christian nationalist. It’s a lazy way of categorizing both yourself and others into boxes that, depending on where you stand, a) allows you to easily write off others you disagree with, or b) find a community of people who hate all the same things you hate.
That’s how you end up with deconstruction becoming indistinguishable from “I think there are things about evangelical subculture that are bad.” I love how Tyler Huckabee talks about this in his latest newsletter.
A lot of what passes for “deconstruction” today doesn’t even rise to that level of critical thought. There’s been no serious attempt to analyze your received constructs, strip away what’s not working and replace them with something healthier. Instead, it’s just bitter “youth group bad” pattern recognition that is often rewarded by others in your ideological cohort with favs, retweets and “you win the internet today, sir!” backslapping. And if that’s all you’re looking for out of life then you might as well have stuck with evangelicalism.
I’m sure there are plenty of things Tyler and I disagree on. But what we agree on is that deconstruction has to be more than “my youth group was really weird,” or, “my pastor said something I disagreed with,” or something like that. If all you’re looking for is a loose identity marker that allows you to throw stones at something that you found offensive or uncomfortable without doing the work to really sort through the question, “if that was bad, what is good, true, and beautiful?” And if you didn’t give the broader Christian tradition a second thought and just ran away from anything with the appearance of “conservative Christianity” because the vibes were off, I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing when we talk about “deconstruction.”
I’m thinking about people I know who can’t sleep at night, wrestling with God and their own conscience over what is true, what isn’t true, how they can know how anything is true at all, how they can trust God, how they can trust the church, what they believe about scripture, how they are to even just be in the world much less as a Christian in the world. They’re wrestling with the church’s witness in the world and what it should and shouldn’t look like, and how do we deal with the issues in the church? It’s not easy for them. It’s tough. It’s scary. There’s a lot of wrestling and work that goes into it. They’re not accepting easy answers from conservatives or progressives. They are truly wrestling with God.
So to just bail on the whole thing because someone said something objectionable one time (or even several times!) is lazy at best and intellectually dishonest at worst. It’s perfectly normal to hear something so objectionable or to see someone do something so harmful that it punctures the trust in the people or institution that you once had. That can be crisis-inducing. That’s exactly why a crisis is so important to me in defining deconstruction. It’s also perfectly normal for it to take a long time to get your bearings back for you to even get a lay of the land after such an event takes place. That’s just probably not the time to rush to social media and proclaim all of your grievances as blanket statements on all people who have the faintest smell (the loosest possible vibe) of the place that just hurt you.
If you’re reading that and think, “thats not me!”, hey, if the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it. But I also hope for some that the quick reaction against it doesn’t prevent some level of introspection, even 10%, to see if maybe that’s whats going on. How can you ever be free from hurt and bitterness if you can’t be honest with yourself about what it is and where it came from?
So writing a book on this is weird. Because I truly, 100% believe there is a real thing going on here. I believe bad things do happen in churches. I believe the church’s relationship with cultural and political power has damaged our witness. I believe people really do have a hard time with the Bible, spiritual disciplines, the institutional church, etc, and those struggles are valid. I take those things seriously. I want the others in the church to take them seriously, and I want us to work together to figure out ways to make the church a healthier place for spiritual wrestling and other difficult things without compromising on orthodoxy. I also recognize that those legitimate critiques and crises are being diluted by the day because someone didn’t like their youth pastor and just never went to another church but now they’re saying they “deconstructed” or whatever. Is that somewhat of a hyperbole? Somewhat. But not much.
Where do we go from here? I’m going to keep pressing on, taking the serious people seriously and doing what is within my ability to help. I’m encouraged by people like Tyler, who, despite differences we may have, is calling people to a deeper level of engagement and seriousness beyond “I didn’t like that” repulsion. And for those who are stuck there, I just hope they stumble across something on these here interwebs that makes them think, “huh, maybe I didn’t deconstruct enough,” and they keep pressing in deeper and deeper until they actually strike gold, instead of settling for the fools gold of tweetable outrage.